Don't Stay and Oxycontin
My daughter is here right now, and we've been going out to the beach, going out to eat, and hitting Happy Hour. I'm having to stick to soft drinks due to the drug they added for the MS. If you drink with it you get crazy drunk off very little, and the only time that happened some idiot accused me of flipping birds at him, when I was just trying to stand upright and walk. No conscience bird flipping going on at all.
Between career talk and talking about how weirdly drugs affect you this evening I found myself telling my daughter about my roughly 3 years working at the large internal medicine clinic as a social worker, a job that started out with me lining up people for hospice and mental health help, that rapidly devolved into taking over a number of functions at the clinic.
Yes, this is the place that fired me in 2007 for daring to have a serious asthma attack when I was exposed to an aerosol, the first real appearance of the asthma from routine to "oh holy crap this is bad!"
But I knew way before then that I really needed to leave, and had started half-hearted job search before the firing. It was a petty place filled with crazy situations. I also sued them and won. Which did not help my employ-ability in my field.
How crazy? All the other doctors in the practice except the head doctor would hold meetings, urging the staff to keep head doctor's patients away from him, route them to other doctors, make every effort not to add new patients from out of the area without a full set of medical records, and a letter from their current physician. I was tasked with trying to stem the flow of pain patients going to the El Jefe Doctor.
From that point on a lot of my time was taken up with going over the state pharmacy board print outs on prescriptions filled, flagging new patient records for things that seemed squishy, fielding calls from pharmacists in Kentucky, West Virginia and other far flung places people started popping up with opioid scripts written by El Jefe. Keeping down the number of pain pill seekers took up more of my job than what I was hired for.
Later, a year or so after I was let go, the feds busted El Jefe for running a pill mill. He served no jail time, but paid a large fine, and lost his license to practice medicine for a long time. The hospital connected to the clinic stripped him of admitting privileges, or the ability to order tests or anything else. His partners fled and opened their own competing clinic. When his license was restored providentially he was stripped of his prescription-writing rights. The last I heard he was unsuccessfully running a weight loss clinic out of his huge building. Could not have happened to a better person. He was thoroughly unpleasant to work with or for, frequently screaming obscenities and insults at everyone in the office.
I carried away a big lesson. Don't stay in a job where the entire atmosphere is toxic. If they try to add ridiculous duties to your job to the detriment of what they said they hired you for simply leave. I should have, I would have saved myself some heartache earlier had I taken my own advice.
We were futilely attempting to stem the rising tide of the first bits of hard core opioid addiction so unsuccessfully through a doctor that refused to believe it was a problem. At one point there I had a list on the desk of the silliest reasons people asked for early refills. I called that my "The dog ate my Oxycontin" list. Everything from "I went swimming in the ocean with my pain pills in my pocket" to "I lost them on a trip to Bosnia".
I've often thought about that time, and the first problems with people trying to get prescription painkillers. I admit, I don't "Get" it. I had to have wrist, elbow, shoulder surgery for carpel tunnel run amok in the early 2000s, and was put on copious amounts of opioids for the months it took for physical therapy to be proven useless and to gain insurance approval for the surgery. It got bad in July, I did not receive the okay for surgery until January, all those months on opioids.
I remember asking our pharmacist just how long it took to develop an addiction. He shrugged and said, "Oh about a couple of weeks." I was on them for a long time, but I never liked it. The drugs make me feel like an emotionless turnip fallen off the vegetable wagon, just sitting by the side of the road. I hated it, but needed the pills, particularly after intense PT sessions. But I got off them very quickly after surgery, cutting the dose in half every so many days until I was finally off. It was unpleasant and my body complained, but I did it. I had no wish to ever feel that way.
Which makes me wonder what is going on inside of folks that love opioids, that love whatever the drug is making them feel. I've come to the conclusion that it has to be something very different in the brains of those prone to addiction, some pleasure center core being stroked that does not exist in myself or others I know that don't like opioids. It cannot just be that they are bored, or traumatized, or as one friend suggested, undealt with childhood trauma.
I think when science finally has all the answers to opioid addiction it's going to come down to different brain chemistries. Hopefully once that is figured out they'll be able to test for it, assigning something other than opioids to those sensitive to it. I hate the way opioids make me feel, but when you're in extreme pain a few Vicodin or Oxys can be so helpful.
Between career talk and talking about how weirdly drugs affect you this evening I found myself telling my daughter about my roughly 3 years working at the large internal medicine clinic as a social worker, a job that started out with me lining up people for hospice and mental health help, that rapidly devolved into taking over a number of functions at the clinic.
Yes, this is the place that fired me in 2007 for daring to have a serious asthma attack when I was exposed to an aerosol, the first real appearance of the asthma from routine to "oh holy crap this is bad!"
But I knew way before then that I really needed to leave, and had started half-hearted job search before the firing. It was a petty place filled with crazy situations. I also sued them and won. Which did not help my employ-ability in my field.
How crazy? All the other doctors in the practice except the head doctor would hold meetings, urging the staff to keep head doctor's patients away from him, route them to other doctors, make every effort not to add new patients from out of the area without a full set of medical records, and a letter from their current physician. I was tasked with trying to stem the flow of pain patients going to the El Jefe Doctor.
From that point on a lot of my time was taken up with going over the state pharmacy board print outs on prescriptions filled, flagging new patient records for things that seemed squishy, fielding calls from pharmacists in Kentucky, West Virginia and other far flung places people started popping up with opioid scripts written by El Jefe. Keeping down the number of pain pill seekers took up more of my job than what I was hired for.
Later, a year or so after I was let go, the feds busted El Jefe for running a pill mill. He served no jail time, but paid a large fine, and lost his license to practice medicine for a long time. The hospital connected to the clinic stripped him of admitting privileges, or the ability to order tests or anything else. His partners fled and opened their own competing clinic. When his license was restored providentially he was stripped of his prescription-writing rights. The last I heard he was unsuccessfully running a weight loss clinic out of his huge building. Could not have happened to a better person. He was thoroughly unpleasant to work with or for, frequently screaming obscenities and insults at everyone in the office.
I carried away a big lesson. Don't stay in a job where the entire atmosphere is toxic. If they try to add ridiculous duties to your job to the detriment of what they said they hired you for simply leave. I should have, I would have saved myself some heartache earlier had I taken my own advice.
We were futilely attempting to stem the rising tide of the first bits of hard core opioid addiction so unsuccessfully through a doctor that refused to believe it was a problem. At one point there I had a list on the desk of the silliest reasons people asked for early refills. I called that my "The dog ate my Oxycontin" list. Everything from "I went swimming in the ocean with my pain pills in my pocket" to "I lost them on a trip to Bosnia".
I've often thought about that time, and the first problems with people trying to get prescription painkillers. I admit, I don't "Get" it. I had to have wrist, elbow, shoulder surgery for carpel tunnel run amok in the early 2000s, and was put on copious amounts of opioids for the months it took for physical therapy to be proven useless and to gain insurance approval for the surgery. It got bad in July, I did not receive the okay for surgery until January, all those months on opioids.
I remember asking our pharmacist just how long it took to develop an addiction. He shrugged and said, "Oh about a couple of weeks." I was on them for a long time, but I never liked it. The drugs make me feel like an emotionless turnip fallen off the vegetable wagon, just sitting by the side of the road. I hated it, but needed the pills, particularly after intense PT sessions. But I got off them very quickly after surgery, cutting the dose in half every so many days until I was finally off. It was unpleasant and my body complained, but I did it. I had no wish to ever feel that way.
Which makes me wonder what is going on inside of folks that love opioids, that love whatever the drug is making them feel. I've come to the conclusion that it has to be something very different in the brains of those prone to addiction, some pleasure center core being stroked that does not exist in myself or others I know that don't like opioids. It cannot just be that they are bored, or traumatized, or as one friend suggested, undealt with childhood trauma.
I think when science finally has all the answers to opioid addiction it's going to come down to different brain chemistries. Hopefully once that is figured out they'll be able to test for it, assigning something other than opioids to those sensitive to it. I hate the way opioids make me feel, but when you're in extreme pain a few Vicodin or Oxys can be so helpful.
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